Quotes About Shakespeare

Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.

My foundation in acting has been serious theatre: Albert Camus, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare. It's really the best medium to learn the craft.

You came to talk about the play, he said. Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare. Who was he? she said. Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.

I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.

Is life essentially accidental and meaningless, or is it as profound and mysterious as Shakespeare's great tragic hero believed it to be?

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.

up' is from when a bird has eaten too much of his kill and doesn't want to hunt or do anything for a while," she said. "And 'under my thumb' and 'wrapped around his little finger' are from holding a falcon tight to your fist by its jesses so it can't fly. Those terms were in Shakespeare's plays and until then they weren't common usage.

William Shakespeare called dreams the 'children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.

That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.

That happens a lot with Shakespeare. The women go after what they want; the men wind up suckered into things.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his…. It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

I adore your jealousy, especially when it's so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not. I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve. But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet. Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end. So the critics are just stupid? It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.

Po?i auzi marea? - ?sta era citatul favorit din Shakespeare, a lui Keats.

It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound up in a good way.

In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down, unless you're a king.

I was a stage actor for 20 years or so; I was leading men in classical things. 'Shakespeare,' you know. And now, I never play leading men. I'm that kamikaze comic that comes from the left, turns the table over, and leaves, or the hyper-intelligent yuppie scumbag if it's a drama.

I've done maybe twelve of Shakespeare's plays. I was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for years. Whatever influence that has never leaves you. If you learn to drive a car, and you learn the right way if there is ever a right way. You learn the good aspects, you learn to drive properly. And that never leaves you.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.